As modern aviation advances, the demand for ever-increasing flight envelopes and pilot performance grows. To help meet this demand on the aircraft and on the pilots, modern aircraft include impressive arrays of displays, instruments, and sensors designed to provide the pilot with menus, data, and graphical options intended to enhance pilot performance and overall safety of the aircraft and the passengers.
Not only has aviation advanced but electronic displays have also advanced. Large displays, measuring up to 14 inches by 10 inches, have been developed for use in aircraft. Further, many modern aircraft may use multiple large displays, in some cases numbering as many as four large displays for a large passenger aircraft. As such, cockpit space has become increasingly scarce, forcing the large displays to multi-task, for example, presenting various menus and various functional information depending on the flight condition and preferences of the pilot. These large displays are commonly referred to in the aerospace industry as Multi-Functional Displays (MFD).
Some MFDs, typically those substantially directly in front of the pilot or copilot, are programmable and/or personalizable and used by the pilot as the primary instrument or display for flying the aircraft. These displays are commonly referred to as the Primary Flight Displays (PFD) and are assigned or dedicated to one of the pilot or copilot. MFDs and PFDs typically include a separate controller, including knobs, radio buttons, and the like, to select different menus and graphical presentations of information on the displays. Additionally, the cockpit instrument panel includes individual controllers for specific aircraft systems, such as the fuel system, the electrical power system, weather detection system, etc., which further crowd and complicate the cockpit instrument panel.
Despite the reliability of modern aircraft electronics and electronic displays, safety features and redundant systems are still developed and installed by aircraft manufacturers and, in fact, are required by Federal Aviation Rules (FAR). For instance, large passenger aircraft falling under the FAR Part 25 and Part 121 must include a standby display which must be visible to both pilot and copilot at all times and display a minimum of required information: aircraft altitude, attitude, and airspeed. To meet these regulations, one standby display is typically mounted on the instrument panel between the pilot and copilot.
Unfortunately, the expanded use of large MFDs and PDFs on the cockpit control panel leaves little space for placement of other instrumentation. This is especially true for the traditional placement of the standby display in the center, between the pilot and copilot, on the cockpit control panel. While this center location meets the visual requirements of FAR 25.1333, most aircraft manufacturers, however, now consider this center location ideal for additional large MFDs.
In addition to the lack of space on the cockpit instrument panel, the additional complexity and high performance of modern aircraft places extra workload on aircraft pilots. Although large MFDs help pilots efficiently manage the workload, the aircraft pilots, during emergencies and/or certain aircraft maneuvers, must scan instruments, gather vital information, and manage to fly the aircraft simultaneously. In some emergencies, the standby display may be the only instrumentation available to the pilots. Unfortunately, the traditional placement of the standby display forces the pilot to perform different instrument scans to locate and gather necessary information from the standby display, which inherently multiplies the already heavy pilot workload during an emergency.
Conditions requiring the pilot to scan along multiple axes, such as vertical and horizontal, during an instrument scan are referred to by those of skill in the art as parallax. As known by those of skill in the art, parallax conditions during flight, and especially during emergency conditions, significantly increases the pilots workload and stress.
Although previous attempts have been made to relocate the traditional standby instrument from the center of the instrument pane, they have not been successful. For example, free space for the standby instrument is available on the far sides of the instrument panel. This position, however, fails to comply with the visibility and access requirement of federal flight regulations for both pilots. Furthermore, such positioning does not address the increased workload applied to pilots during instruments scans, especially those scans done under parallax conditions.
Likewise, placement of the traditional standby instrument above the PFD has been equally unsuccessful. The region of the instrument panel above the PFD has traditionally been extremely crowded with avionics instruments necessary to display various flight data and control aircraft systems. Although the traditional standby instrument is a critical device in emergencies, the traditional standby instrument is not otherwise used very often. As such, placing the rarely-used traditional standby instrument among the highly used displays and controllers above the PFD has been previously considered operationally costly and inefficient.
Therefore, there is a need for a standby display configuration that is compatible with the large MFDs and limited space of modern aircraft cockpit instrument panels and also helps reduce the workload on pilots under difficult flying conditions.